Animal Rights Top Ten List
by Jeff Potter
1. Question your motives for a win-win situation. To better understand this situation, we can’t look at it as an argument or get automatic validation from being on either side. We have to verify our true reasons and motivations and seek to rise above our present position, because none of us have reached the end point of our possible understanding of the subject. Just watch how many people (you! me!) will start arguing immediately upon reading even this first point! Indeed, it’s very hard to even stick with the questions involved in the AR issue. Non sequitors pop up as quick as you can blink! Being aware of the limitations and tendencies of the issue gives us a chance to at least partly avoid the biggest, most obvious pitfalls. But even our failures should give us more tolerance of others. Thinking about the basics of AR will also give us the strength to see when it’s best to smile and let remarks pass–when it’s hopeless to reply or get involved because the more ignorant of the basics or blind to their motives anyone is (pro or con) the less likely there can be education or understanding–it would be too big a row to hoe. Every question must be answered at the right level, in light of both parties ability to understand and to act on information. Time and effort must not be wasted! It’s disrespectful to both parties to indulge fancies. If you just want to show someone or smash some kid’s illusions, you’ll get the reply you deserve! For many modern questions, an answerer’s reply would probably more correctly refer to the questioner’s homelife instead of to the supposed question, so much so are supposed ‘issues’ merely masks for other things. Despite the popularity of controversy, I sense that it’s hardly useful at all. The only thing that’s usually created is crude, rude energy due to friction–which is not at all suitable for polite conversation. Progress can only be made with care and out of the range of habit. It’s only natural then that some of my thoughts below might not seem direct. Straightforward approaches are nearly always barred by fixed, automatic reflexes and habitual responses. How can such reactions give any help to human learning? Check your reflexes at the door as best you can! Remember, though, that these thoughts of mine are brainstormers and starters, meant mainly to jar one out of a status quo approach. So let’s start!
2. What’s an animal? First, sort out what’s an animal and what’s a human and what’s their relationship. Then move on to what’s a right and what’s the purpose of animals or humans. These are the easiest tasks in the whole issue! If we can’t make sufficient headway on this first question, we can start being more tolerant of others right away! I doubt we can find the complete answer here anyway, but if we can make any progress we can possibly detect overall purposes and perhaps shed light on our rights and responsibilities vis-a-vis animals.
3. Animal consciousness? Note that humans have concepts and a sense of “I.” Do animals have either? Animals seem to navigate space and time without a sense of ‘me.’ Thus they have no future or past to remember in such a way: me then, me now, me in comfort, me in pain. They are thus perhaps not subjective–they are objectively united with nature without any possibility of separation. Thus whatever they might be, the experiences for animals of individuality, loss, pain or pleasure are probably at least quite different from ours and probably have different meanings and purposes. Animals do everything because they must. They eat each other alive. Can there be a bad animal? All animals perfectly fulfill their destiny. Do we?
4. Biology and morality. The material relation of man to animal is one of predator to prey. But given morality (and nothing else), the role also includes stewardship. If we weren’t AWARE of our complex bigger picture connection to animals it wouldn’t matter what we did to them: we could kill them until they were gone, then we would be gone, then nature would do the next thing. We could behave like animals and dominate the earth until a natural cycle reduced us, if we didn’t CHOOSE to take care of this world–not only just to preserve it (we could be barbaric and still technically preserve most of nature for endless recycling) but also to use our relation to nature to educate (Latin for ‘draw out’) ourselves and the truth of the natural wholeness of our situation, because morality always tends toward greater good and greater wholeness.
5. Scale of being. Given morality there is a scale of being, where all that exists on the scale is lovely, necessary, valuable and worthy but where each gets different treatment. The scale goes from lower to higher, more or less along these lines: rocks/water, plants, worms, snakes, birds, mammals, primates, humans. Thus how we rightly treat a worm is different than how we rightly treat a chimp. And it is just as easy to misuse rock or corn–and have such use bring disaster–as it is to respectfully kill a cow for food, and have that killing bring life. Thus one can consider all life forms to be worthy of life and full protection and at the same time use them as needed and as they ought to be used.
6. Natural rights? Awareness of a right is a human construct stemming from an awareness of higher law and obligation to charity (Latin for ‘the demonstration of love’). Everything has its rights, all are equally necessary, but none are the same. Even the rights of man change from birth to death. To the extent that the emphasis isn’t on voluntary respect of these rights and instead on legal protection, the power of the state is the only thing that grows. Understanding of rights can be at a very low level even as legal enforcement of rights proliferates. Thus you have the condition where someone says they love animals so they ban you from hunting them. This is a non-sequitor situation; its only effect is to increase the power of the state; it does not reflect anyones love of animals, because someone else hunting them does not affect the animal lover, nor does hunting imply hate: the hunter also loves the animal and even displays his love in the same way. Killing an animal has no connection with a hateful or harmful act. The ban is just simply an extension of the state’s coercive power over others. And the important question is not whether the banner can do this, but do THEY have this right. (This case is illustrated by an animal rights activist who replied to this list of AR concepts: she said that her friend loved animals and so she could understand her wanting hunting to be banned and thought that I was being stubborn for not respecting this position. I insisted that a ban had nothing to do with love, but was instead a management tool not needed in this case.)
7. Religious truths imply special duties. Given the physical animalism of humans, the choice to not kill or to be a vegetarian is an unnatural religious act, a separation from nature to remind one of a bigger picture of some type. As such it contains all the obligations and realities of religion. One aspect is that it is a practice and not a location of good or evil. Another is that its power is secret and personal or inner. Thus vegetarianism doesn’t make one good, but it can be used for good. Like all practices, if used wrongly, it can have the opposite effect as intended. (Health itself also has to be considered as a religious concept at its root.)
8. All life dies–this is not bad. If humans are to live, they must also die–and face death and their connection to it. You don’t fix or deal with death by banning it, avoiding it, stopping it. Such an attempt in the end is what really kills, because that approach contains the superficial dead end. After considering the big picture accurately, someone may give up killing, but their connection to it and responsibility for it persists. Modern hunting is often used as a reminder of our connection to and responsibility for bloodletting. As a result it often falls under the heading of sport (since sport is the process of using our bodies to train our higher faculties) or even fun. It can be practiced in the higher or lower senses of both. (Lower might involve getting your jollies, killing time, getting outside yourself for awhile–low in the way our relation to spectator pro sports is usually low.)
9. Psychological transference: reality for moderns. The reaction to use of animals is often one that involves psychological transference. There can be good motivation about the issue on either side, but everyone should examine the possibilities for delusion. It is no coincedence that antihunting and vegetarianism matches up with modern culture’s nervousness about itself in general. If those who were either pro or con to AR were to find themselves on the wrong side of any of the dozen ways in which they themselves are complying with the modern mentality, then their interest would be severely strained and probably drop to near zero.
One test of the limited truth of extreme AR positions (either for or against) is that country and primitive people don’t ever hold to them–except occasionally and for religious reasons.
To the extent your own situation might be biased or influenced is the extent to which you should moderate your stand. Follow the grinding axe! If you can’t see it, here are a few of the influences on moderns which influence their stand on AR, either for or against: the frustrations from office work creating bloodlust, the desire for adventure or a political cause, the shopping/gadget/achievement impulse (if modern hunting didn’t involve gadgets and difficult challenges, how many men would be interested? primitive hunters work to guarantee results by any means necessary, which moderns would quickly find boring), the definition of skinny beauty, the worship of youth, permanent indulgent adolescence, the macho mentality, the need to have an enemy or a strange Other you can work against, the differentiation and rebellious phase of life, the college experience, powerless and confused feelings coming from a pointless society, the extreme cruelty of humans to each other, class prejudice against rustics and the uneducated or against intellectuals, the lack of contact with animals, with contact often being pets which are often used to mimic human friendship, the pride in modern science and expertise, the insecurity of modern academia and the resulting all-too-common arrogance of professors who lie to students and to themselves, incomprehension of the death/rebirth aspect of growth in life, and the greed exemplified in liability, trespassing and property rights concerns.
Also, don’t forget the Principle of Reversal. If we banned use of animals (in the modern mode of problemsolving by edict, which has yet to work even once, when will we learn?), we may well find ourselves with more cruelty, extinction and pollution coming from modes we didn’t anticipate or detect and which we would be even more powerless to stop. To be precise: you can have Amish people who humbly eat meat in reduced quantity just as they humbly consume everything in reduced quantity, and their consequent harmonious low impact on the earth. (In fact, they don’t ‘consume’ anything per se since they aren’t moderns.) And on the flip side you can have globetrotting vegetarian AR activists who do not use obvious animal products but who in every other way live a life of enormous consumption and poisonous impact on earth in nearly every element in their lives, and for whom, despite their best efforts, many aspects of their lives could be shown to be in complete conflict, frustration, chaos and disarray, but who nonetheless want to boss others around and think they know best. The problem is in how we use something, not that we use it.
We should also question the modern approach to offensiveness and the ‘right to difference’. Both things require license (social permission) to act on. This license may or may not be properly taken, regardless of popularity or trends. To be offended means to be hurt, on my behalf or on behalf of one who has no voice. We need to question our ability to be hurt and our responsibility to avoid this hurt. Is it really the right of an AR person to disrupt a dinner? Should a vegetarian be miffed or upset or disrupt proceedings when a steakhouse they go to dinner to with their coworkers doesn’t have an organic vegetarian alternative meal? Or a wedding doesn’t offer more than a chicken dinner at the reception? Who does it say more about when someone delays everyone’s dinner order while they grill a waiter as to the exact content of all food on a menu in search for a virtuous dinner? The lesson of the practice of politics and religious practice isn’t that one is right and deserves understanding, but how does one properly act when in conflict with the world? Do you hate the conflict or let it humble you? When you’re different, your learning comes from how you handle the tests that come. Which, in particular, is why in Hinduism when you’re invited to dinner with meat–eating friends that you respect them more than yourself and eat the meat. –Thus training your humility and ensuring that you understand that it’s not your vegetarianism per se that helps you, but how you act in relation to it. Superficial, sophomoric modernism entirely misses this aspect of the challenges in life.
10. Necessity is as necessity does. The use of animals as food, clothing and shelter is popularly determined to be not ‘necessary’. But those who kill animals in the past or present for ‘subsistence’ are almost always respected for the humble, balanced, harmonious wholeness of their folkways. This contrast raises important questions. First, the necessary use of animals is only replaced by the use of factories, which themselves displace and kill animals. Second, necessity beyond sugar water and a prison cell is only part of a social construct. If anyone eats meat, it’s necessary subsistence unless they *choose* to do otherwise. Of course there may be more or fewer delusions involved. But dividing people into groups where one kind of subsistence is OK and another where it isn’t, requires accepting responsibility for the artificiality of the action (i.e., you put white fishing families into starvation and exile because they can’t use gill nets while neighboring indian families can) and it also risks a cover-up of the real problem.
In all cases in history, where a group has acquired the power to effect social rules without such cautions and limits, that group has quickly put many people on the subsistence of sugar water and prison cells–and quickly even less.
Fanatics are easily blinded and taken advantage of by fascists and tyrants of all stripes, inner and outer, obvious or subtle. No one ever says outright: I’m going to set up an evil situation. Evil actually only means *confusion*. Evil comes as people try to do good, to fix things — while misunderstanding the problems, their ability to repair them and the quality of the tools at hand and the interaction of all those factors.
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So now that we have a start on the groundrules, let’s start dealing with this issue! : )
